You may remember this humble pedestrian signal, at the corner of Prince and Kent in downtown Charlottetown, from my post 11 years ago wherein I complained that the “DONT WALK” light was burned out. It took an email to the mayor to get it fixed.

I suspect, given its design, its WALK-DONT WALK signals, and its general condition, that this may be the oldest traffic signal in the city. Certainly the signals on this corner are ones I’ve reported technical problems about dozens of times over the years.

I’m happy to report that work has begun on the project to replace the city’s older traffic signals, including this one. Soon Prince and Kent should have thoroughly modern, reliable, pictographic pedestrian signals.

I’m a sucker for a good floating building story.

I was in the midst of looking for options for paying Oliver’s tuition at the University of PEI for next semester when I came across a reference to HigherEdPoints.com, which allows you to redeem Aeroplan miles for tuition vouchers.

The conversion rate is 35,000 miles for $250 tuition.

It suggests here that the cash value of an Aeroplan mile, for flights, is $0.012 each, so that tuition conversion is less valuable than the $420 it would offer for flying.

But flying kills the planet, and education enriches it, so I didn’t hesitate to redeem my miles in Oliver’s service.

You know those super-annoying websites–yes, Aeroplan, I’m talking about you–that hijack your ability to paste values into password?

In Firefox, at least, you can defeat this hijacking, for all sites, by:

1. Enter about:config in your Firefox address bar.
2. Search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
3. Double-click it to change the value to “false”.
4. That is all.

Once you do this, you’ll be able to Command+V or Edit > Paste to your heart’s content.

Hat tip to this Lifehacker post.

Twelve years ago this morning, Oliver and I went to Casa Mia for hot chocolate.

Cycling along Riverside Drive from Riverview Country Market to the Confederation Trail this afternoon, I encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic due the ongoing sewer work on the Hillsborough Bridge. This short video illustrates why cycle travel trumps car travel, especially in cases like this, with a separated multi-use path.

After my brief test drive of a Kia Soul Electric on Tuesday, I wanted to give Catherine and Oliver a chance to experience the car and see how it worked for them as passengers.

I asked personable owner of Pure EV Mike Kenny whether I might borrow the Soul for an afternoon and his reply was “you know there’s such a thing as overnight test drives, right?”

I did not. But I immediately signed up for one.

Mike met me at the Charlottetown Mall bus shelter yesterday afternoon, ran me back to the dealership on Sherwood Road, and then handed over the keys to his Soul for 24 hours.

I drove home to fetch Catherine and Oliver, and we headed off on a field trip to the north shore–Mike’s suggestion, as there’s a free Park Canada-operated level 2 EV charger at Dalvay.

And we found it exactly as described:

Technically we didn’t need to charge at this point, but we wanted the full experience, so we topped ourselves up to 75% and got a chance to figure out how the charger works (in this case I found an odd grey sphere attached to the end of the plug that needed to be removed and set aside during the charge).

Once the car was sated, we continued along the Gulf Shore Parkway, experiencing the full force of the very high winds the Island was struck with yesterday, and seeing firsthand what an amazing job marram grass does at keeping the dunes from blowing away.

On the way back down the Brackley Point Road into town we decided to go out to supper at a place where we could charge the car.

We initially headed to Canadian Tire, thinking the new DC charger there might be in operation, but we found only wires sticking out of the ground waiting to be attached to a charger.

Next we headed to the provincially-operated charger on Gordon Drive, but found it occupied by a provincially-owned Chevy Bolt.

In the end, we found our way to the basement of the Delta Prince Edward, where there are two Tesla destination chargers and a single level 2 Sun Country Highway one.

We plugged ourselves in, had a nice supper upstairs at the Water’s Edge, and, when we returned an hour later, found our charge level had increased from 35% to 55% (meaning we all lost our Price is Right-style guess as to what it would be: I guessed 74%, Catherine guessed 83%, and Oliver guessed 90%).

We finished the evening’s test drive by driving home and plugging the Soul into our regular outside outlet for the night; when I put the car to bed, its display told me it would be fully charged 11 hours and 10 minutes later.

Because we’re monitoring our minute-by-minute electricity usage at home, we’re in a unique position to be able to visualize the charging: here’s a chart showing our electricity consumption last night. The consumption goes up at 8:00 p.m. when I plugged the car in, and dips back down at about 7:15 a.m. Which is pretty close to the estimated 11 hours and 10 minutes the car came up with as an estimate when I started the charge.

The following uptick in consumption after 9:00 a.m. is due to me placing the wet clothes from the washer into the dryer, which gives you some sense as to the relative draw of the car vs. the dryer.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it cost us less than $3.00 to charge the car from 55% to 100%.

This morning, when I came out to the car to see how things had gone, I found it 100% charged and reporting a 155 km range:

The navigation system in the Soul showed this visualization of the range:

The car’s navigation system manual describes everything inside the green circle as reachable, everything inside the red circle as risky, and everything outside the red circle as unreachable. Which has a kind of Chronicles of Narnia vibe to it.

It’s 141 km from my house to Shediac, NB (where there’s a phalanx of chargers), so into risky territory. But it’s only an almost-too-convenient-to-be-true 122 km to the chargers at the Big Stop in Aulac.

Imagining a trip by Kia Soul EV from our house to Halifax, then, seems like it would be possible:

• Charlottetown to Aulac (122 km)
• Aulac to Masstown (100 km)
• Masstown to Halifax (113 km)

Weather would have an effect here–it was mild yesterday, and so our range would be much better than in the dark, cold, dead of winter.

I dropped the Soul back to Mike at Pure EV this afternoon after lunch and found a kind of EV jam session happening, with a large crew from Iris making various test drives and purchases. Once the decks were cleared, Mike kindly dropped me back home in a Tesla Model S (which is also for sale, if you’re feeling ambitious).

I added frozen-food-carrying capabilities to the grocery trailer today, strapping an insulated bag filled with freezer packs to the top of the main carrier. As a result I was able to cycle to Riverview Country Market, buy frozen food, and then keep it cool while I cycled west to Sobeys to finish the grocery shop.

We found the missing 4.

If not for the leaves on the ground, you’d think it was a bright June day.